


Ashes Among Us

by endae



Series: Before the Bridges Burn [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence - Weirdmageddon, Dissociation, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Paranoia, Sibling Love, Supernatural Elements, Suspense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-03-21 20:17:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13748481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endae/pseuds/endae
Summary: On his last breath, he made the sacrifice to fix everything. As far as he knows, that’s exactly what it’s done – almost too well.Sequel toBefore the Bridges Burn.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr Link](http://endae.tumblr.com/post/170629467970/ashes-among-us-part-i)   
> 

The world doesn’t end with a bang, or a whimper.

It ends with a crack.

Existence, as he remembers it, may as well have been a dream. Black and endless, the new world waiting for him stretches far into an eternal night. For eons, that’s all it feels like. Floating aimless and forgotten to a cruel and indifferent plane.

The moment he recognizes that he’d had a soul once, he feels it reaching out into the dark, searching.

It’s the closest he feels to consciousness.

From within him, it’s waking. Some ball of light with a purpose, some disembodied spirit determined to escape.

When the feeling comes back to him, they come trickling one by one. Like moths to a flame, they gather. Flocking to his shell of an existence, as if desperate to remind him. If time is a concept then emotions must be too, because it’s in a shapeless, yearning form that it dawns on him that he can’t remember them and their sensations. An ocean of feelings without names, some overwhelming inkling that grief is seemingly the one that never left.

You’re born in the darkness clinging only to that, maybe.

He’s forgotten who he is.

He has a name and he has a story, but in whatever oblivion he’s been sentenced to, there are too many gaps to connect the dots with ease, at first.

But they come.

Wisps of a past life. A different time. They’re fragments before they’re memories, a collection of chipped and cracked moments alluding to some existence he can’t remember. But they come. They come with the staggering realization that there was a heart that carried them once. A body that housed them.

The moment he recognizes he has eyes, he opens them to a blacker void than what he’d shut them to.

He was a brother once. Some story without an epilogue.

Whatever pieces he’s scattered to the universe, by fate, they come rushing back. Like dots of a puzzle, the images come alive with each link. Some secondhand account of a life that isn’t his anymore. He grasps it with all he can, listening for a heart that hasn’t beaten. Spreading limbs he couldn’t feel.

_‘That’s right…’_

He was a brother before he was a mistake.

From the corners of his prison, he hears it calling to him. Like the answers themselves were fighting through the darkness just as he was, he feels them creeping closer, closer.  Truth itself always found a way, a gracious homecoming of familiar sights.

Familiar words, from an existence that felt like lifetimes ago.

**_“………ake up…”_ **

And for more reasons than just one, the moment he recognizes that he has arms, he feels the hairs stand on them at the words. He’s heard them before. They’re his.

**_“…ease……lease wake up……”_ **

_‘No…’_

They’re his and they’re loud and they’re vibrating, a haunting reminder of how this all came to be. Like someone or something has cracked his head wide open, it all comes flooding back too quickly. Images flickering like a broken film reel, replaying over and over.

A slip of a broken promise through a walkie-talkie.

A fight that didn’t need to happen.

A hell on earth.  

The aching gap between his ribs when he’d first held her, hands trembling, Mabel wake up, _why won’t she wake up–_

A hand outstretched, consumed in blue fire.

A deal to fix it all.

The moment he recognizes that he has a spine, he feels the sins crawling through it. That’s right. It began with him. Reawakening a sleeping demon, feeding him the answers through a summer painted with ill-kept secrets and bleeding youth. He dragged them all down with him, deeper and deeper into the vicious cycle of manipulation that’s tormented this family for years. For it to amount to whisper that puts all the pieces in place.

One string, one desperate fragment that comes too clearly when everything else won’t.

**_“…I’ll do anything…”_ **

_‘No…!’_

All one cruel lie, one giant _game_ that never _ends _–_ _

_“Mabel—!”_

The moment he recognizes he has a body again, it’s throwing itself.

All at once, it comes. What isn’t black is bursting with color, what isn’t color is a moving blur. The first breath, the first sensation, worldly essences rushing to fill his empty being with light. Motion.

Gravity.

As if only just suddenly recalling that it existed, the panic is replaced with a sharp lurch in his stomach. The world around him spins, falls, and materializes with a hard crash against the floor.

Everything is too still.

The ringing in his ears comes first – deafening and somehow blinding, made worse by the metal tray that comes clambering after him. Against the tile, it clangs and bounces, sending piercing waves of dissonance into his already fragile head.

Dipper wonders, briefly, where he is. But the sharp scent of antiseptic cutting through the air doesn’t leave much room for wonder.

A hospital.

Frantic, he feels around for the empty weight of a vest that isn’t on him anymore. Orange tee beneath it, gone. And if the pounding in his head from the direct impact with the floor is anything to go by, then it means his hat is missing too.

Groaning, Dipper presses his hand to the side of his skull to alleviate the blooming ache. More and more, the signs come to him. The swapping of his day clothes for a gown. The hollow beep of a heart monitor. Steady and patterned, and most definitely not a flat line.

He’s awake — and if he’s awake, he must also be alive.

_‘What…?’_

By some trick of fate, his life is still his own.

Through the disorientation, a lone voice pierces through the fog. Someone else – someone living, breathing, and the thought terrifies him, he isn’t sure why. It comes sounding like they’re speaking to him from underwater, calling to a child drowning inches below the surface.  

_“—ipper!”_

In his swimming vision, he sees another pair of feet enter the room. Slipping in and out of focus, he remains paralyzed in place by the vertigo of it all. When the figure’s close enough, they plant their hands firm against both his shoulders, more patches of warmth to fight off the cold grip of oblivion.

Dipper swears, if only for a moment, that he hears the heart monitor freeze with him, when his eyes meet hers.

“…Ma…bel…?”

Mabel. _Mabel Pines._

His twin and his best friend, who only hours ago, lay motionless against the wilting grass with a heartbeat too slow to be her own. _Mabel Pines_ , who without so much as a word, became the prize of this sick game they never wanted to play.

She casts him a sour look. Something almost humorous if not for the heavy reality of quite literally everything. Dipper’s jaw hangs in disbelief as she looks him over, staring baffled, wordless.

As nonchalant as humanly possible, she clicks her tongue in disapproval.

“Bro. I know you’re itching to get out of here, but can you give it a day? At least?” she patronizes. She tugs on his sleeve, insistent. “C’mon, upsy-daisy. Let’s get you back in bed.”

Effortless, her arms cup the undersides of his to help lift him up. Dipper sways when he rises, instinctively clawing for the mattress when he feels himself begin to sway too far to one side.

It may as well be the closest they’ve had to a hug since….since.

It’s the first time he notices her sweater — Pink, confettied. Her yellow skirt and its matching headband. He notices what it _isn’t_ : worn and ruined, stained with tears.

With delicate hands, she helps him climb back onto the bed, refusing to let go until he does.

Mabel eyes the tray he brought down with him: a punctured cup of pudding, cold veggies, and what he could only imagine was a once hot bowl of soup. Kneeling, she scoops what she can back onto the platter, wiping the floor with the napkin. She chuckles.

“Although with the food they give you here, I can’t really blame you for tryin’ to make a break for it, can I?” she adds, glancing up at him with a side smile. “This stuff’s almost worse than Grunkle Stan’s.”

Chit chats like nothing’s happened. In his peripheral, she focuses her attention back to the spill, humming some thoughtless tune to fill the air. It settles in his heart what’s going on. He’s alive. He’s here, and so is she. But…but she _shouldn’t_.

Just as they had when his body wasn’t his own, the pieces start to connect.  

He glares daggers into the blanket, fisting the blanket at both sides. The cogs in his head start to turn, the anger coursing through his blood.

“…You haven’t had your fun, have you?”

To that, Mabel glances back to up to him from the floor. “Huh? What’cha talking about now?”

“It wasn’t enough for you, was it Bill?” he snarls, balling his fists so hard that they tremble. Calling for ghost that isn’t there, but has every intention of haunting him until his last breath.

Below him, she raises an eyebrow. Mabel’s nowhere close to mopping up his mess entirely, but she’s halfway decided to abandon the task at hand. Climbing back into her seat, she parts her lips to say something, but he’s already rushing to conclusions.

Purgatory. This is purgatory.

“So what more do you need, huh?!” he spits, gritting his teeth. “You’d said she’d _live _–__ ”

“Hey, relax!” she urges, scooting closer. Still vying for some level of composure, she keeps her voice steady, but drops any front to be casual about it. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but everything’s fine!”

_“We made a deal!”_

And if he’s still here, then it means she’s still his. It meant this game wasn’t over yet. Lies, all lies, _everything_.

At his side, Mabel’s nervous grin falls the more he shouts. She reaches, keeping her hand hovering away just enough for her own safety, but still close enough to break him.

“Dipper, you don’t understand—”

“No, _you_ don’t understand, I—” he sputters, almost hyperventilating.

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t _real_.

“Mabel, I should be **_DEAD_** _!”_

In the small echo chamber of the room, it comes sounding louder and harsher than he means it to be. It isn’t meant for her. It’s for the walls built around them, the puppet master behind it all. If he screams it loud enough, they’ll crumble. He’ll die for real.

He still shakes her to her core, the words cutting through her like glass. And he watches as it does — her eyes widening at the edge in his voice, the way she retreats inside of herself. Her lingering hand retracts fully, Mabel keeping her eyes trained on some arbitrary corner of the room. She lets loose a shaky breath, crossing her arms to hide the nails biting into her sleeves. Her nervous tick.

“Well… _yeah_ , you should be…” she says, shrinking in her seat. “….so it’s a good thing Grunkle Ford called for help when he did.”

He whips his head up to look at her.

“Called for…?” _‘Called for help?’_ There’s no way. The world was about to end at their feet, what help could he have scraped together? “W-What do you mean?”

Before Mabel can entertain an answer, his eyes are flying to the window. Peering out its glass, he searches for the flames and the turmoil. For the toppled structures and the wildlife lost in the frenzy of it all.

For a bleeding sky that isn’t there anymore.

Dipper blinks his eyes, again. Again. The scenery doesn’t change.

Instead of a world on its last leg, it’s one upright and thriving. Trees. Passing cars. Soft oranges and pinks, a softer sun making its descent over the hills.

Every mark of destruction, vanished.

“Dipper, what’s the last thing you remember?”

Mabel’s voice pierces through the mind fog, enough that it leads his eyes back to hers. Apprehensive in her seat, she fidgets. She makes a conscious effort not to bite back on her lip, he can see that – twice, three times.

It’s a simple question, but the implications behind it fuel the paranoia already starting to mount. It means that something happened that should have taken his memory, and as far as he knows, it has.

“…do you remember leaving with Grunkle Ford? All the ‘smarty mission’ mumbo-jumbo?” Mabel suggests, filling in the pieces for him.

To that, he nods, cautious. Ford’s order still at the forefront of his mind, he waits for Mabel to give off a sign that she knows more than he does. There’s still plenty she doesn’t, but the tables have turned too easily these days.

“….do you remember crashing?”

Vividly. Even with whatever drugs they’ve put in him, Dipper can still feel the searing pain in his shoulder from the joyride. The bruising on his hip. Nothing quite as intense as the splitting headache, already made worse from his trip to the floor moments ago.

“…Gonna take that as a ‘yes,’” she continues, leaning back in the chair. “Anyway. Grunkle Ford said you guys found…a UFO? Something? Something.”

She huffs, but not unkindly so. Crossing her legs, she stares down something that isn’t him, eyes avoidant with what he could only describe as frustrated concern.

“Something you shouldn’t have, if you ask me.”

Something that led to the catastrophe that landed him here in the first place. As if she’d been there herself, Mabel relays it with the most intricate of details, right down to his tumble chasing after —

_Ford._

It hits him pitifully late. His pulse skyrockets when it finally does, halfway ready to leap from the bed again. He didn’t even think to ask.

“G-Great Uncle Ford,” he stammers, tensing up. The rushed thoughts fill his head, _get up, run, find him._ “Grunkle — Where is he!? Is he okay?! When did—”

“Hey hey hey, I said _relax_!” she repeats, throwing her hands up. Almost abrasive, she nearly tips out of her seat to keep him in place. “He’s fine, promise! He’s actually the one that brought you in here.”

And he stares at her for however long it takes for that to register within him. It does, eventually. After his heart levels out, fighting through the mental veil keeping it at bay _._ Ever cautious, ever questioning. It’s habit, now.

“…He is? You mean he’s not hurt?”

Mabel nods. “Nothing bad enough to need a doctor like you, that’s for sure.”

She’s too calm about it. If Ford really had injuries demanding a doctor, that’s not something she would lie about. And Mabel’s terrible at lying, if anything, so he breathes a sigh, hands twisting in the covers again.

“….Anyway,” she starts again, “we were all pretty freaked out, so we got you here as quick as we could. Like faster than you can say “ _‘Ohmygoshweneedtogethelpfast,’_ ” she emphasizes, clapping both hands to her cheeks. The panicked expression she wears only lasts a second, her hands returning to her lap. “And here we are.”

In a hospital, with no indication that Weirdmageddon had ever touched the town.

“Then…none of this makes sense.”

And the disbelief sends him sinking back down to his pillow. He regrets it immediately, the blaring medical lights lancing into his brain. Dipper drapes one arm over them, if only to hide the hot sting starting to form in his eyes.

_It didn’t make sense._

And it needed to, if he made it himself. Mentally, he jumps back to square one.

Part one: Ford’s mission. They’d left for the foothills of town and found the craft. He knows that much.

Part two: After cheating death, he’d accepted the apprenticeship, but had done so unknowingly while Mabel was listening. That came next.

Part three: He came home to her, distraught, rightfully upset having heard it all. He remembers that too clearly.

_‘The rift broke, we found her…’_

The deal to fix everything.

Then…nothing.

As if it’ll help, he shuts his eyes tighter. Tighter. And he sees it, ghosting at the back of his mind, the image that won’t seem to leave him. Twisted. Sickening. Some blackened, faded image of Mabel looking down at him, tears welling in her eyes. Of an hourglass on its last grain of sand.

So how much of this was real? How much was a dream? How blurred were the lines between them?

Dipper senses them. Vital pieces that he can’t collect, lost somewhere between what his mind knows and what his body remembers. The connection that the two can’t seem to make.

_‘How much of this is Bill just toying with us?’_

He keeps his arm resting over both his eyes, breath hitching at the thought.

“Bro?”

“I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on,” he murmurs, absently panicked. It’s still fresh in his mind, the last wisps of _something._ A fever dream doused in agony that felt too real to be anything but.

His voice is smaller than he knows it to be. More’s been stolen than just his memory.

Dipper shakes his head against the pillow.

“I don’t know why I’m here. Because I really, really shouldn’t be.”

“No one takes a literal _nose dive_ and walks away from it, Dip,” Mabel presses, patting the top of his thigh beneath the bed sheet. “You’re right where you’re supposed to be: in a hospital.”

It isn’t what he means, but the energy to even think about fighting it is draining enough.

Daring another chance of clarity, he lets his mind drift back to the memory…only to be cut short by the nausea that overtakes him. Abrupt, the pulsating ache comes like shock waves through his brain, and he abandons it altogether. If the growing migraine in the back of his skull is anything to go by, thinking about anything for too long will keep him sick. Shackled in the present. He can’t do this with words, with thoughts, but…

Something clicks with him.

Sudden, Dipper scrambles to sit back up, grabbing for her hand.

A compulsion from seemingly nowhere, he wrestles to get a hold of her. A burning need for some semblance of reprieve he’s been denied again and _again_ and _again_. Linking their fingers, trembling, waiting to give into the impulse.

“Hey, what are you—?”

It’s as far as he gets.

The urge to squeeze her hand is lagging somewhere far behind him. One his body won’t dare to act on. He’s afraid of the answer it’ll give him.

The one it gave the first time still puts ice in his chest, now that he can recall it.

_‘Is this really her?’_

But what he will get, is Mabel’s other hand, hesitant, to rest on top of his. Her touch feels like her own.

“Listen, you’ve had kind of a crazy day. So try not to worry about anything, okay?” she tells him softly, shaking her head. “You’ll turn your brain to mush. Assuming it isn’t already. But we’re hopeful.”

She punctuates it with a gentle squeeze, like she can read him like an open book. It’s almost alarming.

“And we’ll work out all the birthday ‘deets and everything when they say you’re better. All that grown up stuff.”

 _That’s_ what raises the red flag. How it sounded. Manufactured.

Fake.

As if touch alone could poison him, he abandons her hands to claw his own back close to his chest. The instinct stings, and he can see it hurts her too, the way her fingers curl to fill the space he’s left behind. He swallows hard.

“You are… _Mabel_ right?”

Her immediate reaction isn’t to flinch, he notices that first. It’s a welcoming sign. She even scoffs. “Jeez, how hard did you hit your head? Of course I am! Who else could I be?”

_Bill._

“P…prove it to me.”

If she has something to hide, it doesn’t show. The most he gets is a side lipped gesture, but nothing suspicious.

“Born August thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine. Twin, five minutes older, one millimeter taller,” she recites, raising a hand to count on. “Student of the month last March, recipient of the sixth grade’s “Most Optimistic” award…”

Elementary stuff. Dipper nods the longer she drones on, but it’s halfway through her social security number that something comes to him. A glowing moment, bubbling up from seemingly nowhere.

Some precious, guarded memory that leads his mouth to act before the rest of him can.

“—What did you eat that day in second grade that scared the teacher?”

The air stills between them, and Mabel pauses.

Even he has to process what he’s just said.

It catches her off guard, eyes floating to his. There’s an unspeakable sense of emotion lined within them, like the only testament he needs to validate that it’s really her. Her mouth forms the words, but she holds the answer inside her a touch longer.

“…Banana slug,” she finally responds. It’s raw and it’s real, and somehow in its somber tone, still so-very Mabel. In the heartbeat that she says it and before she cringes, it’s a glimmer of a hope. “Whoa, that’s old. Where did that come from?”

It catches him off guard, too. Where _did_ that come from?

“I don’t know, I just…remembered that, for some reason…” he stutters, breathing sharply. “‘Guess I’m hanging onto whatever I can.”

However much that is. It still isn’t enough.

The forced humor that comes with it is broken and nervous, and even she seems to pick it up too well.

Dipper keeps his eyes boring into the sheets, growing number by the second. It takes every fiber of his being not to question it all. The linens were scratchier than these last time. The walls were a tint darker.

In the mounting list of things that didn’t feel real, her smile is genuine, at least. It always is in moments like these.

He sees her at the corner of his vision. Mabel’s holding that gaze at him, the one patient but pressing for answers too. Selfishly, he’s forgotten that. He doesn’t know how many hours she’s been sitting, waiting for him. But.

He doesn’t know how to start this, or even if he should.

“There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t…know how to put into words, but this all…feels wrong.”

“It’s okay that it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to,” she reassures, thoughtful. “And really, it shouldn’t. Is it such a good idea to be thinking this hard after taking a fall like that anyway?”

She isn’t wrong.

But the answers. He needs them. As if his own body held the key to everything, he lifts his hand to hover a few inches from his face. Opening and closing his palm, studying it up close. Hairline cuts still smeared in a light layer of dirt. Bruises peppering his hand, more snaking up the side of his arm. Proof of the accident…and only the accident.

He can’t remember what Bill’s fire had ever felt like.

“Listen, I know it’s scary. You _did_ hit your head pretty hard,” Mabel says, leaning to sink both her elbows on the bed, hands cradling her chin. “They said you probably wouldn’t remember a lot. But Grunkle Ford told me everything, so don’t worry, okay?”

Then that begs the question of how much constitutes _everything._ ‘Everything’ like the accident? ‘Everything’ like the rift and all the secrets hidden inside it?

More questions than answers. A personal hell if he’s ever lived one.

He bites back on his lip.

It isn’t that he can’t remember. It’s that he doesn’t know how much was memory and how much was a dream.

“So get some sleep.”

And before he has a chance to sort it out, Mabel’s rising from her chair. With almost too much care, she takes it upon herself to tuck him in as much as she can. A bit excessive if it were any other time, but in the moment, it couldn’t be more welcomed.

“They said we could take you home later, but they want to keep an eye on you for now.”

His heart quickens at that. Before he can process it, Mabel’s turning on her heel to leave. The cold flutter in his chest returns with an aching vengeance, the daunting realization that he doesn’t want to be left alone again. But she’s waving goodbye, his heart hammering as she sets her eyes on the doorway.

“ _—Wait._ ”

More impulses. He doesn’t remember stretching his hand her way, but like many other things that shouldn’t be, it’s there.

She pauses. Mabel’s eyes sweep over to look at him, her features lined with some instinctive nature that tells him she was expecting it. He almost gets up to follow her, but his whole body still feels like lead, weighed down by more than just the drugs.

Mabel gets the message. She tilts her head to one side, a small but knowing smile spreading.

“Do you want me to stay here?”

She’s well ahead of him, then. Mental clarity, at least one of them has it right now. He nods.  

But rather than seating herself back in the chair, she reads something in his face that tells her to step closer. They’ve always spoken better without words, and it doesn’t seem to fail them now. More evidence. More telling signs this was her.

When she’s inches from his bedside, he wraps both his arms snug around one of hers, tucking it close against his chest. Breathing.

“I don’t think…I believe in any of this yet,” he says. Somewhere deep inside, still lagging. He isn’t brave enough to reach for her hand just yet. Isn’t brave enough to accept this as true.

Dipper rests his cheek against her arm, closing his eyes. She feels like herself, too.

“…I just need to know you’re really here.”

And his voice trembles with the courage it takes to be that honest about it.

Between the two of them, everything almost feels alright. Her very presence permeates the empty spaces that he didn’t know existed until now. _“It’s okay,”_ only works for so long. Whatever words exchanged, they’re unmatched by the sheer amount of comfort in just being able to feel someone else.

Mabel must agree with him, the softest touch of her fingers atop his head to ground him. It’s almost healing.

“Bad dreams are crummy like that, huh?”

So normal. So delightfully odd, the two of them. It’s her and him and his heart monitor, still droning away in the white noise.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

He’s still collecting the pieces of himself, some million and one shards floating just out of reach. Touch light against his head, Mabel strokes back and forth with her thumb and like a trance, he leans into it. It’s all he can bring himself to focus on, until she pauses far too soon, abrupt.

“…did…something happen to make you think that?”

“It’s a long story. Like a really long story,” he deflects. Not one worth rehashing if he doesn’t have to. “Not one for right now.”

But he’ll have to, eventually.

Mabel accepts that for the meanwhile though, humming a small noise of understanding.

Little eternities pass before she backs away from him for the last time, planting herself back into the chair at his side. It dawns on him that there are no clocks on the walls here, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing. No time to consider how long he’s been here, how long he’s got left.

One last time, he sinks himself to lay down, hands curling into the blanket. It’s too good to be true. If it’s all a dying daydream, there’s still a chance that he’ll blink and it’ll all be gone. Like it’s the only reason he needs to, he latches on a little tighter.

It all can’t be real, but his body — with all its cuts, bruises, and whatever else he had toiling on inside — unshakably feels like his own.

_‘Maybe…Maybe this has all just been one bad dream.’_

It takes more than just a few times to fall asleep. Of course it does. This can’t be real. It shouldn’t. The last shreds of his skepticism are stubborn if anything, still clinging to the failing logic of it all. It’s by some miracle that Mabel even has the power to override it, the power of presence that’s done more this summer than it has their whole lives.

The darkness is comforting this time, endless but soothing.

As if the shackles and bonds have all come loose, everything feels lighter. Sleep comes as the temporary blessing he truly needs, some freeing invitation to push it all away for a while. Some gracious invite to slip through the crevices, cradled in a shadow of some place more forgiving.

The world doesn’t end with a bang, or a whimper.

Against all odds, it hasn’t ended at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr Link](http://endae.tumblr.com/post/171879625270/ashes-among-us-part-ii)
> 
> Cipher at the start is Vigenère, the keyword will be revealed in a few chapters!

* * *

  _“U'lm qlwe fzpdyultzg polk ahetz._

_I'mp vqeq czg sbjp fhjw eumf.”_

* * *

It can’t be more than a few hours when he wakes again.

At least, that’s how it feels. There’s the kind of sleep that takes you and keeps you, and the kind that feels more like being dunked in a puddle and left hung out to yearn for submersion. A taste of sleep. And it’s definitely the second.

But feeling less like lead and more like they should, Dipper opens his eyes to a blur that lingers for far less the second time around. Whatever frantic grip it is that held him captive hours ago, it’s left him be. With consciousness, comes the realization that his heart isn’t pounding anymore. Breathing doesn’t hurt. His thoughts are still anything but pacified, but the shift in scenery doesn’t twist them into panicked mantras this time.

It’s _‘I’m still here,’_ before it’s _‘not in the hospital anymore,’_ and the bite of it only serves to remind him of how hard it was going to be to shake his own convictions.

Carefully, Dipper lifts himself to sit up and take in the surroundings.

The Shack’s living room.

At some point between then and now, they’d taken him home. And at no point at all had he stirred — or if he did, he doesn’t remember. It’s becoming an unsettling pattern. By consequence, the thoughts assault him the instant they have an opening.

 _‘This isn’t real’_ and _‘It’s all a lie,’_ stubborn but resilient.

To ward off the paranoia, he takes in everything around him, piece by piece.

There’s a familiar fabric against his skin. Out of instinct, he feels at his chest again. Just as before, still missing his vest, but back in the tee he’s been sporting all summer. Back in his shorts, his socks.

Dipper knows the answer even before his hand combs through his disheveled hair, but he’s never felt more naked without his hat.

There’s the cushion beneath him. Rather than a hospital bed, it’s Stan’s yellow couch. Musty and worn, but in the moment, feeling far more plush than it ever did those Saturday mornings as he marathoned Ghost Harassers.

It’s as the thought passes through his head that he’s peering over at the TV set, which for some reason, is turned on. It’s been muted with a string of subtitles rolling along the bottom of the screen, and the program itself is something too old for him to recognize.

He runs through the checklist in his head.

Dipper studies the nook, the table to the far right. Atop it, Mabel’s model Shack for their thirteenth birthday party. The fish tank — still growing more algae by the day. The walls are structurally sound, and its blue paper is still peeling beyond repair, but not so much that it looks like it’s weathered an apocalypse.

Nothing a touch out of place. Everything all as it should be.

If anything, he feels like the odd one out in all of it.

Yanked from his daze, Dipper stiffens at the sound of footsteps above his head. More so that they’re getting closer, etching a familiar path in the wood for him to know they’re heading for the stairs. From seemingly nowhere, the nerves leap out from the recesses of his head, intuition telling him to feign sleep before they come down _(‘but why?’)._

But it’s the way they descend them, light but bounded, for him to know even before she turns the corner that they’re Mabel’s.

It quells the nerves, just a bit.

And sure enough, a splash of pink rounds the corner wall and he blows out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. She’s carrying that knitting box of hers that seems to travel wherever she goes too, a comically large trove that’s somehow able to house her endless supply of yarn.

By chance, she lowers it just enough to stop obscuring her vision, and her eyes light up when they reach his.

“Oh Dipper you’re up!” she exclaims, freezing at the threshold. Even if he can’t see her mouth, there’s a smile in her voice that’s far from hiding. “One sec, let me go put this down first.”

She turns hard on her heel to shuffle into the kitchen, a hurried step in her pace. Out of sight, he hears the telling thud of her knitting box hitting the table. In a heartbeat, she’s back out again, making her way to him.

“Heyyyy,” she starts, propping herself atop the dino skull at the side of the armchair. On her elbows, she leans in, “I was thinking you were out for the night. How you feelin’?”

“...Exactly how you’d expect after crashing out of the sky from an extraterrestrial spacecraft,” he answers, blunt. Dipper reaches back to massage at his shoulder, a raised bump that’s either an inflammation or a stress knot. It’s anyone’s guess at this point. “But yeah. Not too shabby.”

He glances around the room again, like there’s anything left to survey. His mind’s still numb to it all, and the next thought surfaces without much meaning to it.

“Umm...we’re home.”

“Call the presses, your brain _isn’t_ mush,” she blurts. Mabel follows it with a big sigh of relief, but he thinks it’s attributed more to what comes next than it is playing along with her joke. “Yes. We’re home.”

The sound of it alone, comforting. They were home. The hospital, miles and hours behind them, the warmth of a run down house he’s learned to call home. The roof is in one piece, and as he’s learning, so is everything else he was convinced wouldn’t be.

Dipper rubs at his eyes. Maybe not mush, but his whole head still feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton.

“Must be exhausted then. I don’t even remember getting back.”

Mabel snorts. “That’s probably because Grunkle Stan carried you in. That or the ‘maybe-but-we’re-not-sure-yet’ concussion.”

He hopes she’s joking. “How long ago?”

“Let’s see...We took you home around...seven. So a bit ago.”

It means next to nothing, at first. By habit, Dipper raises his hand to check for the watch that isn’t on his wrist anymore. Right. Doctors probably took it off, that is, if it wasn’t destroyed altogether. Mabel picks up on it, and she’s glancing past him to what he imagines is the owl-clock face hanging above the doorway. She squints.

“...Or a lot ago. It’s almost eleven. Huh.”

He nods. Not a huge shock. What is, however, is that’s the first question he wants answered. There’s a torrent of them lighting up his insides, but the mental capacity to prioritize them is fleeting. He goes with the one burning brightest:

“Where’s Great Uncle Ford?”

Mabel puffs her cheeks out, pouting. “Beats me. After he brought you to the hospital, he rushed off again to go deal with whatever it is you two found out in the hills.” A beat. “Not that he really wanted to.”

That answers that, then. The rift. Of course he would.

“And Grunkle Stan?”

“Helping him? Assuming they’re not being butt-faces to each other for once...”

Mabel huffs when she says it, rolling her eyes. But they darken just a tinge, the arms crossed around her chest tucking in a little tighter. Rare are the moments that she lets anything show that isn’t cavity-inducing kindness, but today has been more than just one for surprises.

“Who would've thought: they can’t even look each other in the eye any other day, but the _minute_ either one of us is in trouble, all bets are off. Figures!”

He shares the frustration. But unlike him, Mabel’s temper only lasts a second before she drops it, reverting to her bubbly exterior in a flash.

“Anyway. You’re probably starving right? I’m pretty sure you weren’t gonna eat cold soup off the floor,” she thinks aloud, sliding off the skull and onto the floor. “Stay right there, I’ll make you something.”

“Wait Mabel, I’m—”

Not hungry. Still wrestling with a stomach churning too violently to even think about ingesting a meal, but she’s turning to dart into the kitchen before he has the chance to protest. Defeated, his outstretched hand falls back to his lap, sighing.

Well. Maybe the hunger was clouding his thoughts.

When she disappears around the corner, busied noises start up in the kitchen. The opening and closing of cabinets and drawers, and if he puts it out of mind, he may as well pretend that she’s Stan.

Thinking about either of them only furthers the strain of it all. They’re still at odds, the two of them. If they’re not working together this moment, then they’re doing everything in their power to avoid the other.

But they aren’t here. Stan’s comically the farthest thing from a helicopter parent, and maybe Ford even more so but…he needed a hospital. Needed Ford to carry him in, Stan to carry him out. He was in such bad shape that he needed to be watched.

But they aren’t here.

It stings more than it should.

The Shack’s too quiet without either of them. The muted TV doesn’t help, and if he could will himself to turn on the volume, he would. But the exhaustion has more than rooted him in place. The lingering ache of the crash has proven just as relentless, shooting painful reminders every time he moves more than an inch. It’s a perfect excuse to let his mind wander.

That is, until it’s cut off by a high pitched yelp, followed by the loud crash of a pot or pan to the floor.

“Mabel?”

“I’m fine! Totally fine!” she calls back, a hushed _‘ow’_ muddled beneath it. “Don’t come in, I made a mess. I’m almost done though.”

He won’t argue with that. Nevermind small movements — the mere thought of moving is enough to flare up the strain growing in his side. It’s only a prelude of what’s to come. He’s in for a sore few days, he knows that much.

It’s all of a few minutes that he has to himself, and Dipper spends it mindlessly watching the television. To pass the time, it’s a mind game of trying to figure out the plot of whatever’s been on.

(His brain, she’s affectionately been dubbing “mush,” may not be straying too far from the truth — it takes too many tries just to put names to faces, even when they’re repeated. Twice, three times. He isn’t sure if he should be worried just yet, but _‘concussion’_ starts to echo louder and louder.)

Before the thought has a chance to fester, Mabel emerges from the kitchen with a bowl in one hand and a water glass in the other.

“Ta-da! Mabel’s ‘Miracle Fix-Me-Up Mac n’ Cheese!” she sings, presenting the bowl to him. “Specially made with breadcrumbs, cream, and enough butter to put you back in the hospital. Bon appétit.”

Mabel passes it off with a proud glint in her eye, and really, she has every right to. For something she’d just thrown together, it looked surprisingly appetizing. Like she’d reached in and plucked it straight from a cooking show. The smell hits his nostrils the second it reaches his hands, and as if on cue, his stomach growls in unison.

Maybe he was a little hungry. She went through the trouble to make it anyway.

Dipper's barely reaching for the spoon before she cuts in again.

“Oh, and you should take these too.”

When he looks up again, he’s met with a small bottle, orange and translucent — _a prescription_ — inches away from his face.

She shakes the bottle, slightly. He raises an eyebrow. “...Medicine?”

“Uh-huh.”

A long jumble of letters forming some drug he doesn’t know the name of. But clear as daylight, it’s there — _Pines, Mason_ in all bold capitals at the top, as if he needed anything more to cement him in the reality of it all. Reluctant, he takes them from her.

“For what?”

“Um…I’m not actually really sure…” she admits, staring down the bottle. “I think you tore something? Or broke something? Couldn’t tell you. All I know is you need one in the morning and at night.”

And true to her word, its instructions are printed right above its mess of a name. One waking up and going to sleep, notably, with food, and that’s probably why she’s brought them out. The assumption he’ll sleep after this is an optimistic one, but he’ll swallow that thought alongside one of the pills and a spoonful of mac.

The first bite does wonders for him.

It’s...it’s _delicious_. Filling. Rich, but not overpowering, and tasty enough that it could very well trick him into thinking he really is hungry. It’s true wonder how she managed to dress up a dollar’s worth of boxed mac, and Stan’s pantry only carries so much that they can bear to stomach. It’s a far cry from canned meat.

Now if only he could focus on eating the rest.

Hunger comes in waves. Where the first few bites left him feeling famished, the will to eat dwindles the more the impending conversation start to seep into him. Ultimately, it reduces to some pathetic attempt at passing the time, spoon clinking against the bowl as he pushes the noodles around.

Beside him, Mabel deflates.

“Hey what’s the matter? Does it taste okay?” she prods, frowning. She scratches at the back of her neck, antsy. “I actually didn’t even check to see if anything was expired…”

“No, no, that’s not it. This actually turned out really good,” he deflects it, offering her a half smile. That much was genuine. For all the culinary monstrosities she’s created, Mabel’s truly a visionary in anything when she tries to be. “...Thanks by the way.”

“Oh,” she responds, flat. “Okay. Good.”

Another lapse of silence. Mabel sits waiting for him to elaborate on his own volition, but like so much else, he pushes it aside in hopes that she won’t press it. It’s a wishful thought — and he should know better. The only thing missing from the whole scene is her twiddling her thumbs. What he will get, is a cough that sounds more than forced.

“So...what is it?”

That’s the thing. There are too many ‘whats’ to count.

Does he do it? Forge another story? Bury the ones he still needs to explain?

_‘I shouldn’t.’_

Lying has already gotten him in more than just a few messes this summer. By now, he thought he’d learn the lesson. Before this, he still hadn’t. It took nearly losing his uncle. It took jeopardizing his own life, and the painful realization of the after effects it could’ve had on everyone else’s if he’d lost it.

It took that painful, _painful_ waking nightmare, its remnants still burned deep into his skull.

Dipper breathes out a sigh, shoulders slumped to the openness of it all. It’s a strange feeling, vulnerability. But after all he’s hidden from her, Mabel deserves that much.

“I’m just...still trying to process everything, y’know?” he answers, tone light. Everything he’s said, everything he hasn’t. Sorting through a million and one thoughts that only sleep seems to keep away.

The idea that he’ll have to sort through them all, eventually.

“It’s…it’s a lot.”

To his relief, Mabel buys it for what it is. Even without knowing everything, she gets it. As if in solidarity, she lowers her head to lay her chin atop her crossed arms, a little closer to his eye level.

“Mhm, I don’t blame you. I’d be pretty freaked out too, if it were me,” she mumbles, mindlessly drumming her fingers along the couch. “So I really gotta step up my ‘alpha twin’ game, don’t I? Doin’ everything I can, bro.”

She really is. He digs another spoonful.

“Yeah well, I’m surprised Stan even let you cook.”

Dipper shovels a few more bites in his mouth, more for Mabel’s sake than for his own. That’s the plan, keep eating before he realizes that his stomach is still sick. Before it ejects any of it. It only distracts him for so long. When the initial awe of the dish begins to wear off, like clockwork, the mounting apprehension takes its place.

It’s a brash change of subject, but if he sits with the guilt any longer, it’ll do more damage than what the security droid has done already. The spoon stills in his bowl.

“...I think I have something I need to tell you.”

Where to start, that’s the question. How brief could he make this that she could get the full picture without feeling cheated on any of the details. It’s a grave matter they need to deal with now, and she senses it too. He catches the short-lived concern before masking it in playful curiosity.

“Yeah? C’mon, fill me in,” Mabel coaxes, a beckoning motion with one hand. “Give me that sweet, sweet juicy space-gossip.”

Beneath the facade, he knows she’s dying for answers.

He sighs, eyes falling to the bowl in his lap. Here goes nothing.

“Great Uncle Ford and I left this morning for the foothills,” he starts. “It was a mission to get something we needed for…”

No.

“Actually, let me backup a bit...”

From the beginning. The very beginning.

He tells her everything.

The night they summoned a cartoony wizard, the dangerous prophecy unveiled to him in the basement. An oath he took to keep it secret. A blind acceptance not to tell anyone, _‘not Stan, not even your sister.’_ It’s daring an earful from Ford later, but his uncle’s lukewarm wrath, assuming he’ll be mad at all, is a weaker storm to brace than enduring the fallout of what could’ve been.

He tells her everything but the dream that’s been tormenting him ever since.

Mabel says nothing through it all. The occasional nod of her head, periodically. Some visual affirmation that she’s listening.

 _‘Something that was a threat to the universe,’_ he tells her, a rush of memories flooding after. Project Mentem. The dangerous glint in his uncle’s glasses, the one that left him pressed up against the study’s back most wall, finger shaking on the trigger— _‘Something Bill was after.’_

 _‘Something,’ ‘something,’_ as if there’s anything left to hide.

While she offers no words, Mabel’s expression changes through it all. It’s childish before it’s pensive. Anxious before it’s disturbed. All while he lays it all bare, she holds her silence, passing through just about every emotion there is.

Amazingly enough, outrage is never one of them.

“...I’m sorry Mabel,” he adds at the end, some pitiful afterthought as if it’d justify anything. It takes everything not to cringe at how fake it sounds. “It’s...something I’ve been keeping from you that I’m only now realizing was a really bad idea. It really could have hurt you.”

But it hasn’t and it can’t, now that he’s done this.

“And if it did, I would’ve never have been able to forgive myself.”

To wrap it up, he punctuates it all with the same sigh he started it with. There. That was it. Everything left out in the open, and for once, it feels like a weight’s been lifted.

Moments after his last word, there’s nothing. She doesn’t say anything immediately. He doesn’t look her way, anxious of what he’ll find.

But like a light bulb has gone off in her head, he sees her stir in his peripheral. Mabel slaps a hand light against her forehead, followed by a laugh. And like it’s so obvious to her—

“Oh! You mean ‘the rift’, right?”

The spoon in his hand clatters hard against the glass bowl, blood running cold.

_‘...what…?’_

Dipper’s eyes widen, his whole body paralyzed by the pure shock that’s engulfed it. He doesn’t know what to feel, but he can feel one thing for certain — her eyes on him. He’s almost afraid to meet them. If his nightmares have taught him anything, it’s that this is the part where they’ll be yellow and slit with a murderous smile waiting for him. Where the voices become distorted and the shadows grow around them.

By some shred of courage, Dipper turns to her.

What he finds there is not only an expression free of anger, but one filled to the brim with warm delight.

“Yeah, it’s totally fine! Don’t even worry about it,” she reassures, sliding off the skull, “Here, I can even show you. Lemme grab it.”

And like it’s the most mundane thing in the world, she skips into the kitchen again, a hop in her step that wasn’t there before. Carefree and blissful, she leaves to fetch it like it’s a newspaper, and not some cursed object _(‘still’)_ holding their universe in balance. All while the crisis alarms go off in his head, she treats it like nothing, and he feels the fear of the unknown creeping back into the crevices where it doesn’t belong.

The jig’s up. The secret he’s housed all summer, its cover broken.

_‘How much did I miss while I was out...?’_

Because Mabel knows now. It shouldn’t shake him as much as it does. And it doesn’t, not more than the underlying fact: that this thing, this _curse_ that’s put hell on all of them, is still existing. Still capable of hurting.

In the back of his mind, he’s half-begging she won’t come out of the kitchen again. Everything is still so fragmented, and another blow to the skepticism is more than he can handle right now. He saw it broken. He saw it shattered _and bleeding out and next to it, his sister, motionless_ —

Mabel re-enters his field of vision, and he clenches up a little more.

This isn’t true. Not until he sees it.

But...

She approaches him, and sure enough, he can _sense it._ There’s a telling glow beneath her sleeves, but seeing is believing at this point, and she’s still concealing it like there’s a prank to pull here. Maybe it isn’t it. But his heart is racing the way it always had when it was nearby.

Mabel presents it to him, and there's no denying it anymore.

“See! Perfectly fine!”

The indisputable proof he’s needed this whole time, perched delicately in her hands.

The object that doomed them all, in one piece right before his eyes.

Dipper stares. And stares. He’ll stare and stare until it his eyes bug out, until everything around it blurs and blends together. This is it. This is the part where he’ll wake up in the hospital for real.

He stares and stares.

But nothing happens.

Nothing fades. He can still see it all in perfect clarity — the hairline fractures in the rift’s glass, so perfectly mended that it looks whole again. The ominous dark of its gelatinous makeup, now lightened to a creamy white with orange blotches and black speckles. It glows softer in the low light of the living room than it ever did shrouded in the darkness of the basement.

If he had any doubts about any of this, they’re all but fleeting now.

Because it’s single handedly the hardest piece of evidence that everything past the crash has all truly been a dream.

Mabel beams above him. “Whatever alien goop you guys needed, it worked. Grunkle Ford fixed it as soon as we had you all situated at the hospital...”

Dipper only hears half of it. Barely that, maybe. Still so entrenched in the very existence of it, the reappearance of the rift robs him of any mental capacity to process anything else.

It’s...so fragile looking. It always has been, those rare moments when it was his. For as many times as he wished he could have pushed it away, it’s in this moment that he wants nothing more than to hold it himself. Dream mechanics goading him on, _‘just touch it,’_ just one tap to break the illusion and accept the truth.

Hypnotized, Dipper reaches its way, some longing need to feel it...

Mabel snaps it away like a rubber band, stumbling backward.

“ _Whoa-whoa-whoa,_ hold up—” she interrupts, tucking it close to her chest. Her eyes are frantic, but she’s still wearing that grin that never seems to falter. “You’re still pretty out of it, bro. I’m not sure you holding it is such a good idea yet.”

To that, he’ll retract his own hand too, submissive. He feels the blush fill his cheeks when it isn’t his insides curling in on themselves, realizing what’s happened.

Karma hurts. The irony of it isn’t lost on him.

“Yeah. I don’t blame you,” he mutters, dry. _‘Maybe it’s for the best.’_ “Keep it safe?”

“Of course! It’s not leaving my sight.”

Rather than returning to the skull, Mabel seats herself criss-cross on the floor in front of the couch. Ironically, she chooses to slide the rift behind her back and out of view. He tenses at where she leaves it — _‘someone could step on it,’ ‘she could lean back and break it’_ — instinct hardwired into him, but he shoots them down as they come. Ford didn’t entrust it to her for no good reason.

Mabel’s got this. He’s already unwittingly passed the torch, but he can’t think of a better understudy.

He looks her way again. She’s glaring at him, tapping the ground impatiently with her finger.

“Don’t think you’re skimping out on the space-gossip, I was being serious.”

“Enough of me. Pretty sure you’ve had enough of me today already,” he jabs back, smiling. “So what’d you do today? I never really got the chance to ask you about it.”

Her smile flickers at that.

He doesn’t miss it, but he almost wishes he had. In a blink, the air between them has shifted. Mabel lowers her eyes to the floor.

She chuckles, drawing formless shapes into the carpet.

“...You know how you said ‘it’s a long story’ when I asked you about yours?” she starts. Repeating his explanation at this hospital, she’s talking about. Her shoulders are hunched, unnerved. “Mine kinda is too.”

 _‘and I don’t think we should start it right now’_ goes unsaid, but Dipper hears it just as clearly. She smiles that sad smile that she makes when there’s something to hide, her eyes glued to the floor. Her finger trembles, just noticeably. When he looks hard enough, the rest of her is, too.

Seeing it unfold, he has to remind himself. Their exchange in the attic never happened.

Another figment of his imagination, or what he might even now consider a warning sign.

Dipper’s eyes trace the pattern she draws into the carpet before drifting up to hers, still looking down. “...Mabel, is everything okay?”

It isn’t. It never is, when she won’t look at him.

“...Mabel?”

“S-Sorry,” she murmurs, smile never wavering. She chuckles again, but he can see right through it. “...I’m still trying to process some stuff too.”

Mabel doesn’t press on it, at first. It must be the way he stares at her, burning skeptic holes in her body that she gives in to it.

“Like…well, like our party…like all the packing we gotta do…”

Her finger stills. So does her voice, but it’s so much easier to tell that it’s ready to break. It raises an octave too high, too light, like she’s speaking on borrowed breath.

“...like…how you’re even _here right now_ …”

It cracks his heart, when he hears it.

That triggers it. It’s as she says it that unbridled tears start to roll down her cheeks, falling with muted splashes into the carpet. She abandons the effort to conceal it, her finger curling into a fist.

“...Because I thought I was turning thirteen _alone_...”

It’s all he needs to hear.

There’s more to it. Some plea to never do it again. Some thinly veiled threat if he ever does, but she never makes it that far. The emotion’s already too caught in her throat to say much else.

She doesn’t need to. He gets it.

For several hours, between the crash and the hospital, he was as good as dead to the world.

And like she can read his thoughts, Mabel breaks into a small fit of sobs as he thinks it, and all at once, it all comes flooding back. The ill feelings he thought would leave him if he spilled everything. They’re back with a vengeance.

Wracked with guilt, he can only frown and watch.

She thought she lost him, when it happened.

No one falls from that high and survives. No one gets hospital-ridden and medicated without a brush with death, and it’s dawning on him. He could have died. _He could have died_ , and it pains him thinking about how long she had to sit waiting for him to wake up with no promise he’d wake up at all.

It touches him, enough to set the bowl and water glass down onto the floor.

“Hey c’mon, don’t cry...”

It still hurts to move, but it’s a small price to pay when he sinks down to his knees off the couch and in front of her. With ease, his arms find their way around her, hugging her close to him

She comes undone a little more. The tears fall faster, but she doesn’t wail. It’s a start.

Mabel empties the emotions into his shoulder, and his thoughts are drifting someplace else.

Ford’s promise of an apprenticeship, like so many things, lost between the realm of what’s been real and what’s been a dream. But he can see it now, if it had ever been a plausibility: he would’ve never have been able to agree to it. Even if he’d never come to that decision himself, it takes one of his sister’s teardrops to reconsider everything. It always has.

 _(and in the back most of his head, that ghost of a memory he knows now had never happened. Mabel inconsolable, eyes leaking enough that she could drown the room they were standing in. she was losing him to a brighter future without her_ — _)_

He doesn’t remember what it felt like, but he knows it felt very close to this.

Soothing however he can, he glides his hand across her back.

“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

He means that in more than just one sense, and the honesty of it cuts right through her. One more sob breaks free from her, a little less restrained than the others. It says so much.

He hugs her a little tighter, eyes lidding.

“Sorry I scared you. It won’t happen again. Promise.”

And he has no intention of breaking it. That much was certain. Even if he made a miraculous recovery in the course of a few days, he’s had enough of the weirdness to know where to draw the line. Of course it came to this. Of course it came to selfishly putting his life at risk without second thought.

Of course it came to when he was already way in over his head.

All while she cries into his shoulder, Dipper’s peering over hers to zero in on the rift, still behind her. Its white globs floating freely, juxtaposed against her despair, it’s almost mocking. Even good as new, still toying with their lives, and whatever Ford’s plan for it is, he can only hope it’ll be out of their hands soon.

On her own accord, Mabel draws herself back for him to hold her at arm’s length. Her eyes are red rimmed and puffy, but the grief that was swimming in them before has lessened. He claps at the side of both her shoulders.

“It’s been a pretty long day for both of us, hasn’t it? We should get some rest. We’ll talk this all out tomorrow.”

“Y-Yeah. Tomorrow,” she manages between sobs, wiping at her eyes. He still sees it toiling within her, but she finds what she needs to regains some composure. When she’s calm enough, she takes a breath to speak steady. “Do you need help getting upstairs?”

“Nah. ‘Think I’m gonna sleep down here tonight. Moving doesn’t sound like too much fun.”

Before he does, though, his face turns serious for just a moment. Looking as stern as possible—

“—But you’re not allowed to leave until you smile.”

That’s all it ever takes. Failsafe as ever, the words alone pull at the corners of her mouth, and while it isn’t the kind that hurts his cheeks just to look at, it’s something. Dipper gives a gentle squeeze of her shoulders — wordless permission she’s free to go.  

Mabel rises from the floor, and so will he, enough to climb back onto the couch. He’s swinging his legs back around to lie down, and he catches her turning around to scoop the rift from off the floor and hold close to her chest.

She stays like that a touch longer Dipper finds himself fixated by the way she looks at it, some warm smile and tender eyes that translate to something he can’t understand the full meaning behind. But Mabel treasures its pristine condition as much as he does. That’s for sure.

It’s gone before he knows it. She lets the expression fall away, facing him.

He should know to expect it at this point but Mabel approaches and reaches — ‘ _Oh come on’_ — reaches over to tuck in the blanket around him again. But just as before, does nothing to stop her.

“Hope you have an appetite in the morning. You haven’t _lived_ until you’ve had Mabel-cakes,” she plugs. “And what better way to celebrate you not being dead, huh?”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he taunts, eyebrow raised. And then as an afterthought, a callback to their lighter days of summer— “Syrup race?”

“ _Duh._ ”

Then that settles it. Mabel flicks off the lamps and the TV, the light of kitchen still illuminating off to the left. Dipper rolls to his side to face the inside of the couch, eyes already closed as she finishes tidying up.

He hears the flip of the kitchen switch, footsteps, and a pause.

Then softly, from the staircase: “‘Night Dip.”

“‘Night Mabel.”

How he wishes the night could end there.

Finally feeling at peace, Mabel climbs the stairs as quiet as she can. Even tired, she has that joyous bounce in her step. He visualizes it as she leaves, hearing her reach the landing, trek the hallway, and the creaking open and closing of their door.

A gentle click of the doorknob seals the night, and the Shack goes silent.

...

The second she’s out of earshot, Dipper shifts onto his back again, staring blankly up at the ceiling.

Tangled with his own thoughts, he suddenly feels very, very small.

So much has just happened. It’s inviting a headache just trying to register it all. Being safe at home, Mabel’s knowledge of the rift, _the actual rift_ still with them…and this is only the start. There’s still Bill. There’s still dealing with their uncles, still the need to shine a light on every dark patch plaguing this family. Tonight was the step in the right direction.

Why then?

Why does he feel so much more unease?

He doesn’t know how long he lays there. But he does, playing back every word exchanged. Re-examining everything while his body screams for rest. His brain even more so. Mabel’s shown him all he’s needed to drop his guard...

Yet.

Still somewhere, buried beneath the layers and layers of reason…those images that won’t leave his head. Those voices. The amalgamation and all it’s gaps, still pricking at his insides the longer he keeps quiet about it. It has him retreating back to what seemingly lead up to this, the oath he and Mabel swore on halfway through the summer to talk about their demons in the night with the other when they needed to.

Everything’s all on the table and there’s nothing left to hide, but Dipper can’t shake the feeling that it’s spawned more questions than it has answers.

The line between them isn’t the only one getting blurrier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rift has a slightly different look than how it’s shown in canon now that it’s fixed. The way it’s described is actually just the inverted colors of the rift and lightened up a bit. I'm a little rusty on photoshop, but this is the visual I'm going for!
> 
>  


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr Link](http://endae.tumblr.com/post/174227146085/ashes-among-us-part-iii)

* * *

_“U nfio kov xz ne ulpde xmet mf asqn ulte it ewx owic._

_U cbr'e xoti jau.”_

* * *

When his mind is finally quiet enough to welcome sleep, it comes in fragments. In the midst of tossing and turning, it takes Dipper more than a handful of tries to figure out if the clock face is lying to him. Squinting in the dark is already hard as is. He closes his eyes to twelve-thirty and wakes to a quarter-‘til. Blinks and it’s twenty-past one. Rinse, repeat.

The final time Dipper glances to see the hour hand wound back to nine, he’s given up all hopes at logic.

It’s enough to tell him he _really_ needs to sleep.

And the first time he does for good, he dreams, briefly.

* * *

_The world is in ruins._

_The Gravity Falls he knows is but a dying memory of the wasteland stretched out before him. In what may be the only instance of his head choosing not to betray him, Dipper knows with startling certainty that there are buildings missing from the horizon that shouldn’t. Homes and schools and parks reduced to dust._

_The town is in shambles, and still crumbling. Standing atop the Shack’s battered porch, he sees the smoke billowing from structures in the distance, slowly but surely making their way to him._

_He feels it building in his lungs, the need to hack it up as dire as the need to run away from it._

‘What…?’

 _Everything’s falling apart at the seams. Walls all around him crumbling, the sky trailing after it. This is the end as he knows it, and even then, he knows something is off. Explosions decimating buildings he can see, can_ feel _, but it isn’t the way they shake the ground that disturbs him as much is it is watching it all unfold without so much as a sound._

_The world is in ruins, and it’s far too quiet._

_He shakes his head to it all. No. This wasn’t right. This isn’t the Gravity Falls they knew. There are more fires than there are trees. More gales than autumn breezes, more soot, more destruction, and—_

_And the fear fills his chest the moment it has the chance to seize him. The first impulse to always shoot through his head when things get this bad, the one the that sends him into a mad sprint towards the heart of the chaos._

_Mabel._

_He needs to find Mabel._

_Every gasping breath he takes, he spends it crying out her name a beat later. It’s always weighed down more when she isn’t with him, and it’s with every passing second that she isn’t that it grows heavier, heavier. Their first week in town, abducted by gnomes. Mere moments away from the Northwest Ghost’s wrath. The feeling never changes, but it trickles through his head, his heart, with the gut-wrenching intuition telling him she’s in danger._

_The only sound that registers with him is his sneakers pounding against the dirt, and he latches to it like it’s the only thing that makes sense. In a mute world, it may as well be._

_“Mabel!”_

_The sound of his own voice, paired with the gravel turning over beneath his soles, the only ones making waves through the landscape._

_This can’t be happening._

_Some faint part of him knows it isn’t. Some prodding shred of consciousness that fastens itself to the image of the dinner bowl in his hands, the bottle of medicine with it. The echo of a ‘goodnight,’ the first he’s heard in eons._

_The pieces come together. This right here, right now, is him coping with the guilt the only way his body knows how: living the ghost of an apocalypse that almost was._

_This is all in his head._

_And dealing with a dream demon half the summer teaches you when to question everything._

_(and it starts here. he registers, on some level, the slam of a car door outside. it’s enough to tug him from the inky depths, however slightly.)_

_From ruin to rubble, it all changes, twisting itself into abstract shapes and colors he can’t keep up with. The panic mounts more and more, and it’s by sheer willpower that he forces himself to stop hard in his tracks and think this through. The smallest wisp of reason reaches out to him, enough to crack the illusion and claw towards consciousness._

_He takes in the sight of the fray around him, pitting it against what he knows for absolute truth. Mabel isn’t hurt. Isn’t missing._

_She’s okay. She’s upstairs. She’s asleep._

_She’s safe._

_It’s the first clear train of thought to settle within him, and it’s a catalyst to the voice inside him begging him to listen to it. Because he and Mabel never fought. She never ran out that door, and the rift never broke._

_Weirdmageddon never came._

_In the last act of defiance, he squats close to the dirt, shutting his eyes and clapping his hands tight over his ears._

_Wake up._ **_Wake up._ **

_Be the one in control. Be the one to end this._

_This isn’t happening._

_This isn’t real…_

_This isn’t..._

* * *

  _was there more you could have said?_

 **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **_was there more you COULD HAVE SAID?_ **

I don’t know

**_I don’t know_ **

 

 **** **** **** _(if there was—_

_i’m sorry_

 _please forgive_ ~~ _my mistakes_~~ ~~_my existence_~~ _me.)_

 

You gullible,             _gullible_ _child_

 

did you know you could stop it?

     do you know what _you’ve done?_

 

~~did you know when you die,~~

~~that there’s nowhere to run?~~

 

_(‘you idiot’)_

 

you call yourself a twin? ha! you’re

 

weak!

              pathetic!

                               worthless!

 

it’s ok

 

                _“I’ll be brave enough_

 

it’s ok, don’t let it get to you

 

because we all know

 

_for both of us—”_

 

            how the saying goes:

 

sticks

and

stones

may!     break!     my!     bones!

            but

                    fire

                           and

                    blood

           will

**_E̸̳̝͉͔̠̔͒̂͂͘N̹̲̯͉̜̩̻̆̋̈͑̽̔̔̿͞D̘̻̘ͫ̎̽̿̚͢ ̧̉̃ͮ̌͂̏̋̚͏̺̪̦̝̜̤̼͘M̨̯̄̅̎ͮ̆ͤ̈̈́E͎͙͕̼̣̙̲ͮ͂ͯͮͧ̄͌̀̇—̱̻̹͎̪̪̩͍̾͆ͯͬ̚_**

 

* * *

 _—_ and like so many nights that came before, he wakes just a breath short of screaming.

Dipper’s eyes snap open the second his body is his own again, shooting up and gasping for the air that won’t come to him. Whatever cry had been forming already dies in his mouth, because he _can’t breathe,_ and he can only count on so many fingers how many more times he can handle this _._ He’ll breathe and he’ll breathe for something, anything, to fill the rapidly growing void in his chest.

This isn’t real _—_ no, _this_ , right _here_ , is real. With practiced paranoia, he makes sweeping glances to scrutinize over every inch of the living room. For the faintest hint of anything out of the ordinary.

Dipper keeps them peeled for the shadows that look even a little off. For several tense seconds, it’s all he can do, spy out into the darkness. But when nothing leaps out from them, he lowers his guard.

He breathes a shaky breath, one of many. When his body reorients itself, he peers over at the clock, squinting.

...It’s. It’s one-thirty.

Dipper rubs his eyes, roughly, and looks again. One thirty. One thirty-one. He counts the seconds as they tick away in his head, the relief in realizing that time is passing exactly the way it should. As if there’s more to study, he dares a look at his hands, holding them up. Illuminated from the light of the fish tank behind him, he sees them trembling and covered in a sheen of sweat.

He’s too well acquainted with this sight. On any other night, he’d wipe his hands, shrug, and roll over, the empty hope that sleep would find him again.

So it’s only tonight he’ll do something about it.

He turns to rise from the couch.

The soreness flares up as he does, stifling back a wince as he swings his legs to dangle over the side of it. _Ow_. Just as he thought, wishful thinking he’d be any bit better with a few hours of sleep. ‘Time will heal’ is more proverb than it is sound advice, and Dipper stifles back another just getting to his feet.

There are only three thoughts on his mind when he makes his weary trek out of the living room: check Stan’s room, check Ford’s room, check the basement. Any one of them and its occupants would give the peace of mind he needs, to go to sleep for real. That can’t be asking for much.

He already feels miles closer to closure when curiosity has him sauntering to one of the Shack’s windows. _‘There’s no way’_ is a knee-jerk instinct, but what waits outside fills him with a sense of wonder that’s equal parts hopeful and hair-raising.

Stan’s Diablo parked out front.

 _That_ wasn’t part of the dream, then.

Even if it didn’t make sense, he’s not questioning it. He can’t when it’s the first thing to pull an honest grin out of him.

With renewed hope, he sets his eyes on the staircase.

He has a hunch about who he should look for first.

Dipper climbs each stair, quiet but hurried, and it’s a miraculous feat that he manages to avoid every creaky spot in the wood. Even done expertly, he still sweeps his eyes over to study the door of his and Mabel’s shared bedroom, half expecting her head to come poking out of it.

When the seconds tick by, and she doesn’t, he sneaks up to his uncle’s door. 

First stop: Stan’s room.

It’s the first time he’s grasped its knob since the night of the karaoke party, but even now, the stakes feel higher. Turning it slowly, Dipper opens it just enough to fit one eye through its crack, scanning the inside.

The view is the same as it had been that night. Stan’s failed products still lined walls. His ever-growing collection of casino chips and tacky chains, still building on his nightstand. Empty Pitt Cola cans still littering the carpet, still piles of laundry he has no intention of ever folding.

Still an unkempt bed, but nobody sleeping in it.

It unnerves him, just a little.

_‘Okay. No luck here then...just keep moving.’_

Keep looking around. Find him, because he has to be here somewhere. Dipper backs out of the room and closes the door behind him, turning hard on his heel to head back downstairs. He already has his mind fixed on Ford’s quarters.

Because that’s got to be it. Stan’s not there because he’s not sleeping, he’s up talking with his own twin. They’re sorting matters out.

It’s an optimistic thought, but it’s the only one he can afford to cling to right now. Like it’s the only thing keeping his legs moving, it’ll propel him to the intricate door hidden in the backmost of the Shack.

Second stop: Ford’s room.

He doesn’t hesitate this time. Running the same risk of his uncle sleeping within it, Dipper turns the knob with the same meticulous care as Stan’s, if only a little quicker. He surveys the interior through the crack, eyes flicking instinctively to the couch first.

But just as with Stan’s, its occupant is missing.

Dipper throws the door wide open when it clicks with him, his heart rate raises a little more, and a little more.

_‘Where are they…?’_

Why would they leave the two of them alone all night?

Dipper doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, but it’ll drive him mad if he doesn’t find out. Breaking into a sprint for the gift shop just down the hall, he flies from the doorway without even bothering to close it behind him.

En route to the giftshop, he can almost feel the walls closing in on him. With the illusion of the dark paired with his fading sense of balance, the house could swallow him whole if he so much as blinks for too long. Like a fever dream come to life, he stumbles through its halls, the gnawing instinct telling him to run before they take him.

He almost loses his footing crossing the threshold, eyes locking on its glowing centerpiece.

The last, desperate stop: the vending machine guarding the basement.

_‘This has to be it.’_

Dipper’s knees nearly buckle. Practically colliding with the machine, he’ll throw his body against it to help keep him upright, some underlying relief that it doesn’t twist and fade the way he anticipates it would.

He didn’t think it’d drag out this far. With how the night’s played out, he should have expected it would. But this will remedy everything. Stan’s not in his room because he’s downstairs, he’s with Ford. The answer’s lying beyond this wall, and it’s the only thing keeping him from closing his eyes tonight. 

Finger poised over the keypad, Dipper zeroes in on it and…

And he freezes, his mind reduced to static.

Everything stills. His thoughts go gray, muffled and filtered through the low hum of the vending machine. Only its mechanical whir and his staggered breathes fill the air of the gift shop, and Dipper’s forehead bonks against the glass, staring blankly inside. It’s all he can do. The horrifying realization dawns on him, and he feels numb admitting it. 

The code. _He can’t remember the code._

It’s enough to send his pulse racing again. _He can’t remember the code,_ but before all of this, he could by heart. He’d sought out his uncle on his own accord, typing it in like second nature. Dipper studies the keypad, some futile attempt to flit through every possible combination that has felt even remotely familiar. The panic’s blocking it. That has to be it.

Like the answer’s ready and waiting, he’ll keep his hand hovering above the number pad, waiting for muscle memory to kick in. He’s done this a hundred times. A thousand. On autopilot, he’s bolted down to the basement, but…

It doesn’t come.

And if it doesn’t, then — _oh god, maybe it is a concussion_ — this can’t be the only thing that’s been stolen in his memory loss. It’s a grim forewarning of what else might be missing.

He forces himself to breathe.

_‘Get it together. Relax. You know what it is, just figure it out...’_

Process of elimination. It made an ‘C’ shape, he remembers that for sure. Where the code started is where it gets fuzzy. The hole it's burned in his memory provokes all the subsequent questions — did it start at the top? The bottom? Was it a straight pattern, or did it jump around?

Dipper stares down the pad. It’s regrettably every second that he isn’t trying a combination that he’s pulling more senseless questions from the dark — there wasn’t an attempt limit on this, right? Right. There couldn’t be. It’s a vending machine, of course there wouldn’t.

...But what if there is? What if he just hasn’t triggered it yet?

Bit by bit, his pretense of a composure starts to crumble. The mental pep talk does nothing to stop him from sweating bullets, and in desperation of keeping it from consuming him entirely, he digs deeper in his memory to keep it at bay.

It’s his biggest mistake.

From the depths of him, the very attempt to distract himself from this crisis drags him into the trap of another. It triggers another chilling revelation, because there’s only one other place he committed the vending machine’s code to that wasn’t his memory.

_Journal Three._

And there’s been no sign of it since he woke up from the hospital. 

Dipper’s hands ball into fists, quivering against the glass. This is too much. The facts start to pierce right through him, and it takes everything to fight the urge to slam his head repeatedly against the glass until it made sense. Dipper wracks his brain for a shred of anything, any clue, any recollection, and—

“—‘ _Moving doesn’t sound like too much fun,’_ huh?”

And as if things could get any worse than they’ve already proven themselves to be, he jumps at the sudden voice. He whips his head back to face its source, mere feet behind him.

Sure enough, as if things could get worse, he sees her standing there.

“Mabel?”

His sister stands with her arms crossed and her face stern. Framed the way she is, against the dark of the shop with her hair falling over her the corners of her eyes, it paints her an ominous picture against the moonlight trickling in behind her. Rare are the moments that she truly intimidates him. But.

He’s prepared for the earful to come. Because it may as well, having already broken the promise he formed only hours ago.

Surprisingly, it isn’t the first response. It’s a disapproving shake of her head.

She scoffs. “I’ve heard of a midnight snack, but this is just ridiculous.”

Her comment tempts a lighter approach to this, but the neutral expression with it melts a beat later. She isn’t... _mad,_ not exactly, but she breathes a new air to the room when the hard line in her lips falls away, rubbing at her eyes.

“Diiiiip. It’s like two in the morning. Why the heck are you up?”

He almost answers. Almost. But Mabel cocks her head to the side before he can, eyes scanning the vending machine behind him. Her brow sharpens.

“Mabel—”

“—And why are you snooping around? You told me you were in too much pain that you couldn’t even go upstairs!”

He knows, and he cringes. It’s looking really bad for him. Instinctively, he taps internally for the million and one explanations he could use to talk his way out of this, but it’s as he starts to flick through them that something stops him short. Some moment of clarity telling him not to dig the hole deeper.

He’ll just.

He’ll just sigh, slumping his shoulders.

“Can I be real with you for a sec?”

“...Were you not being real with me _earlier_ ?” she presses. “What happened to ‘keeping things from me was a bad idea,’ huh? Look, I know this is nothing, but _seriously_?”

 _‘I know,’_ he repeats, harsher. He does. And it’s being grilled like this that makes it that much more unbearable. Mabel seldom lets her voice edge on frustration, but he can’t say it’s not deserved. They’re both still the farthest from standing on level ground. There’s still too much too hide, but…

_‘But it’s for her sake.’_

It always will be.

There are moments when he thinks that the truth would set him free. They feel a lot like this, where Mabel casts her eyes in such a way towards him that it makes his chest swell more than she’ll ever know. It isn’t fair to her. She could crack him right in half if she knew how little it would take, his secrets hers to keep. It’s beyond him how she’s failed to recognize that yet. 

Every time he’s considered telling her everything — the _real_ everything, however hundred times he’s thought it over —  it’s been swept under the rugs of his mind by what could come of it. Mabel doesn’t need the extra burden from this. The weight in his shoulders could take him to the ground if he remembers that it’s there, but he’ll be damned if he passes any more of it to her’s.

Mabel knows about the rift now. Knows the hush-hush that’s transpired between him and Ford, all the problems that have arisen out of it.

She doesn’t need the details of his personal hell, the trauma that came with it.

She doesn’t need the weight of her role in it, however fake it ever was. It was too real for him.

He forces himself to look her in the eyes again. Having not moved an inch, Mabel stands before him still awaiting an explanation. The flippant wave of her hand is enough for him to know he needs to say something. Anything.

“Well, go on! Be real-ier than whatever earlier was supposed to be. I’ll wait.”

She won’t wait long, because it’s Mabel’s final bout of interrogation that dissolves the last of his rational thoughts.

He blurts it as it comes to him.

“I feel like I’m dreaming.”

 _‘Nightmaring’_ is more like it. When he says it, it comes out sounding far more vulnerable than he means it to be. It must, because Mabel softens her stance, just a little, and it tells him he’s not the only one reading it that way.

She says nothing.

Dipper links his hands over the top of his head — and it’s the closest he’ll get to keeping them from squeezing the life out of it. If the giftshop could go any quieter than it already has, he senses it the moment he speaks. If it could grow ears, if it could read him, it would know his hesitations too.

How do you say it. _How does he say_ that it feels like everything in the world has shifted one inch to the right, that he’s the only one that’s not in on the joke. How does he tell her that the persistent tingle in his head is the kind you only feel when you’re sleeping, that it’s been hours and the sensation still hasn’t faded. Like there’s still anesthetic slowing whatever thoughts he’s able to process, like they never cut the IV to begin with.

There are a million ways to put it, but none of them measure up to the parameter he truly needs.

_‘I feel like I’m dreaming and I don’t know how to stop.’_

“I don’t need you to tell me that everything’s going to be okay,” he urges, shutting his eyes a little tighter. Her heart’s in the right place. He won’t dismiss that, but…

“I need a reason to believe that it _will_.”

It almost sounds senseless. At two in the morning, already running off so little sleep, it may as well be. She’s given him more than enough reasons. Simply in her being here, it should be enough, but it _isn’t_.

It’s all so stupid. He’s stupid. Everything’s fine, _he’s_ the one that isn’t, and this is too much for either of them to deal with this early in the morning.

This is stupid.

But even if it is, Mabel appears to mull it over seriously.

When he draws a silence between them, she fills it with her own mute gestures. She’ll curl her fingers a little tighter in her sleeve, she’ll breathe in. Even in the low light of the shop, Dipper sees her face and how it gives her away. There’s something resting on her tongue that she’ll turn over in her head for much longer than it should.

Whatever tug of war she has with herself, in an instant, it’s over. What it amounts to is a voice so soft-spoken, he almost doesn’t hear her.

“...Do...do you wanna hold it?”

It brings his eyes back to hers.

“The rift,” she specifies, shifting her weight to her other leg. It’s as she does that she drops her eyes to the floor and to the side, as if ashamed. “I’m pretty sure I overreacted earlier. Which...probably didn’t help too much.”

Then back to his.

“So would it help if you held it yourself?”

She’s...onto something. It’s not the first solution to pop in his head, but it’s as close to a golden opportunity as he imagines he’ll ever get with it. Mabel’s brought it up on her own volition, and he won’t throw away the chance when it’s dangling right in front of him.

Somber, he nods. So does she.

“Okay. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

Just like that, and Mabel trots back out of the shop. Being told to stay put makes him realize how dizzy he actually feels — then again, it might just be the nerves keeping him swaying in place. He follows her gentle footfall mentally as she fades through the walkway and up the stairs.

The clock ticks away in the shop, and it’s mere minutes before she’s re-entering with a bunched up blanket in her hands, a knowing glow beneath its material. Mabel crosses the wood in almost-hurried strides, but as if yanked back by a leash, she makes a sudden knee-jerk halt a few feet away from him.

She doesn’t get any closer. Her hands tighten around the rift.

“Umm...Can I ask a favor first?”

“For?”

“Can you sit down?”

He blinks.

“....what?”

“….Grunkle Ford…sorta told me what happens if it breaks,” she answer, uneasy. The prospect alone makes her fidget. “All that…‘ _End-of-the-world’_ junk. ‘N stuff. Yeah.”

 _Oh._ She knows then. It makes a lot more sense of her nearly ripping the rift from his hands when he’d gotten too close before. Even more so, that he didn’t disclose that part to her in their little heart-to-heart.

As far apart as they were, he can still see that she shares some of the same nervous ticks he had when he held it. Both hands cupping beneath its base. Keeping it close. The tips of her fingers feather-light against the glass. The paranoia surrounding it has infected her, too.

“You think I’m going to _faint_ holding it?”

“I didn’t say that!” she counters. Then a second later, pouting, “...You just...beat me to it.”

He hardly blames her.

Seeing the rift is a shock all on its own — it _was,_ the first time. There’s no telling if holding it himself would send him over the edge. Through Mabel’s eyes, it’s probably more probable than he thinks, if today’s taught him anything.

Per her request, Dipper sinks down to sit flat on the giftshop’s floor, knees tucked up to his chest. It hurts, the muscles around his middle screaming at him, but he wrestles down the urge to make a face to keep from giving her any other reason to be worried.

It’s only after he does that she joins him too, stepping closer and letting the blanket covering it drop to the floor at her side. She seats herself atop her knees with the rift snug against her.

Like it’s her blessing, Mabel extends her hands slowly. Just as before, the rift’s mesmerizing glow streams towards him, and it doesn’t take long for it to tangle him within the haze that ensnared him before. But this time, only wisps of it. Its hypnotic spell isn’t as strong the second time around.

Mabel gives a small bounce of her hands. Permission for him to come take it.

He does.

As if it’s two worlds intertwining, Dipper feels the brush of her hands against his, the cold base of the metal plate. The warmth emanating from the glass. The moment she passes it to him, in what he could only describe as pure divine intervention, everything around him already feels a little more stable. A little more healed.

It’s only fitting — _telling_ — that it should come from this, the very one he’d been keeping in the dark this whole time having enough faith in him to cradle it again.

Because it’s only in this moment that he’ll close his eyes and hold the rift this close, for once.

Every time it’s been his, he wouldn’t dare to take his eyes off it. He could scarcely blink. It’s true wonder how Mabel alone had the ability to wipe it away, but she does, and he’ll cling to it.

He’ll drink in the moment for as long as she’ll let him. He doesn’t know how long that ends up being.

_‘Everything is okay, like this.’_

It reminds him of how things used to be. The warmer times he’s held this.

The very first time Ford let him hold it. The beam of pride that all but radiated from his uncle, the lingering wish he could bottle it up and keep some of it himself. The rift is as much a danger as it is a symbol of hope, and it had always been dependent on who was holding it. 

The temporary peace that comes with it is fleeting.

Because internally, and out of nowhere, the alarm bells start to go off.

Something... isn’t the same.

It starts as a tainted thought, embedding itself deeper into his conscience. The metal...no, that wasn’t different. Still smooth at the edges with a bumpy surface along the bottom. Still cold to the touch. Its paperthin glass, thick enough to protect its contents, but still light enough that saying the wrong words alone feel like enough to break it.

But...

It’s not just ‘not the same.’ It’s _wrong_.

The sensations when he held — no, that’s not wrong either. It’s always felt like this. Still the same sensation of nervous butterflies on his insides, the ones that have nearly made him ill more times than he can count. Still the compulsion to subdue them as much as he can when he’s able to.

Something’s wrong, but it isn’t the rift.

It’s him.

And it takes Dipper far too long to notice he’s gradually been gripping the rift harder. Harder. Too long to catch Mabel’s apprehensive eyes at his handling of it, the burning urge erupting in his veins.

Too long to notice the parasite that’s been slowly crawling towards his brain when he wasn’t paying attention to it, fighting for control.

Too long to realize how close it’s gotten to taking him over.

~~**_‘BREAK IT.’_ ** ~~

In a heartbeat, Dipper’s eyes are shooting open.

It all happens in a blur.

Before he can comprehend it, his hands are releasing the rift — but rationality cuts through the panic at the last second, saving grace that’ll swoop his hands closer to the floor as it drops. It’ll fall the few inches without harm, but still careless enough that it rattles Mabel sitting across from him.

Dipper shoves it out of his grasp and towards her, an ugly scraping noise along the wood that feels like nails to a chalkboard. Roughly sliding it to Mabel, the second his hands are free, he claps one hard over his mouth in disbelief, the other clawing into his chest as he fumbles back. 

She snatches the rift as it glides into her palms, pulling it close to her night shirt.

“Dipper?! What’s wrong?!”

Her eyes dart frantically between him and the object in her hands, sounding off questions that fall deaf to his ears. His heart is pounding far too loud to make out any of them. Dipper sees her mouth moving, could make out the words if he focuses, but he can’t. He _can’t._

Where did that come from? Why?

_Why?_

“—Okaaaaaay, ‘think that’s enough of that~!” she sing-songs aloud, nervous. Without second thought, she scrambles for the blanket she brought it down in to throw over the top of it again, hugging it close to her.

Like magic, it’s only in the moment that it’s out of view that Dipper finds it in himself to breathe again. Barely.

_‘What’s going on…?’_

“What the heck was that all about?”

Dipper doesn’t answer her. He wishes he knew how. Because somehow the influence of the rift has become poisonous, betraying its almost holy white essence.

Even purged of its dark energies, it commands the air and it commands _him_ in a way it never has before. _And that scares him._

Mabel watches him all while he gathers his wits, visibly disturbed. Even he can tell she’s struggling to keep her composure in check.

“Better?"

Without it in sight — much. He nods, still dazed.

And like trying to pretend it didn’t happen at all, Mabel fidgets mindlessly with the blanket caging the rift.

“So what else do you need to know this isn’t a dream? Hot chocolate? A good pinch to the arm?” she lists off, eager to change the subject. “Say the word, I’m on it. Seriously.”

There’s a lot he needs. Answers. The chance to sit and talk through the storm still brewing in his head. A decent enough sleep to help ground him where he needs to be.

Strangely, they’re the first to pop into his head, but nowhere close to what actually comes out of his mouth.

“Grunkle Stan.”

He’s simultaneously none of them and all of them at the same time.

Mabel only blinks at him, taken aback. Surely, Ford would’ve been his first choice, and she seems to have expected it as much.

“...‘You wanna talk to Grunkle Stan?”

“I know it’s late, and I know it seems kind of...childish?”  he adds, voice cracking. Is it really? Maybe it is. “But...I don’t know. I think it’ll help.”

It has to. He already has a reason why it should.

“Besides, his car is here. So he has to be too, right?”

Mabel nods, understanding. “I hear you. Where’d you check?”

“His room first. But basically everywhere in the Shack. I can’t find him or Great Uncle Ford.”

That runs the possibility that his car being outside might not mean anything at all. For all he knows, it could’ve been out there earlier when he’d woken up the first time.

Mabel derails his skeptic train of thought with a sigh. Then, inquisitively:

“....his office?”

Oh.

Well. ‘Everywhere’ except there.

His silence already clues her in. Wordless, Mabel rises to her feet, and he does the same, following just a few steps behind her. They slip out of the gift shop together and head for the crevice at the back of the staircase

When they round the corner of it, Dipper spots it immediately: the low light of a lamp from the other side spilling out under the door, and he absently wonders how he had missed it before.

 _(He walked this way, didn’t he?_ ~~_He can’t remember._ _)_ ~~

Before he has a chance to dwell on it, Mabel takes a step closer to it, her hand resting on the door knob. Dipper watches her from behind, eyes trained on her fingers as they wrap around the brass.  As quietly as she can, she turns it to open it, the faint lighting creeping into the hallway.

Mabel peers into the dark of his office. He holds his breath.

...

But the tenseness in the air diffuses when Mabel turns his way again, smiling. With the rift and its blanket cage still tucked tight against her chest, she gestures with her eyes, darting inward and back again, for him to come closer. Tiptoeing up next to her, Mabel pushes the door open wider for him to spy through it too.

At her invite, he peeks inside, and...

The world feels a little closer to okay.

_‘Grunkle Stan...’_

In the flesh and slumped over on his desk, snoring.

They hover in threshold of his door, watching. When it isn’t pure shock coursing his veins, it’s the sweetest relief he’s felt all night. With lips parted in awe, he glimpses over to see what Stan’s fallen fast asleep on, and it’s too telling what he finds there: a mess of papers strewn in front of him. Noticeably on a few of them, the logo of the town’s hospital.

A standard white medicinal bottle, different from his own, by his head. Aspirin if anything, after what he’s put him through. 

But it’s what _isn’t_ on the desk that says more — Stan’s safe, never left unattended — unlocked and swung wide open, a manila folder with his name missing from the top shelf. Mabel’s matching one is noticeably lying on top in plain sight, and it’s all he needs to see to conclude that it’s his that’s fanned out atop the desk.

The precious documents their parents stuffed at the bottom of both their bags, meant for their Grunkle’s hands the minute they made it to town.

Whatever empty space had formed in Stan’s absence earlier mends itself.

Breaking the momentary trance, Mabel turns to face him again, voice dropping even lower.

“I know you said you wanted to talk…” she whispers, motioning Stan’s direction with her head. “‘Think this good enough for now? I really don’t wanna wake him...”

To that, Dipper nods. More than enough. As long as his day’s been, it’s been no match for Stan’s, undoubtedly. She agrees.

Content with just that, Mabel backpedals and he follows, watching as she eases the door closed as quietly as she can. He’ll steal one last glance at his uncle before he disappears from view, Stan’s snores muddling from the other side.

Mabel yawns aloud, mumbles something about the time, and starts to leave. She only gets so far before she looks back over her shoulder to see Dipper still lingering by his office. He’ll press his hand to the door, then his head, if only to hear him one more time.

_‘He’ll be here tomorrow.’_

It’s the only comforting thought that allows him to let go and walk away.

At the crossroads of where they bid each other goodnight only hours ago, Mabel pauses halfway between the staircase and the living room.

“So. I’ll ask again. And I’m kinda hoping you’ll actually stick to your choice this time,” she begins, rocking on her heels. “Sleeping down here? Or upstairs?”

The attic, he ultimately decides. It’s easier to hallucinate down here — and by extension, maybe so does being alone. Well aware how much his body’s craving an actual bed, he makes his slow ascent of the stairs, lagging behind Mabel as she starts up them two at a time.

But it’s as they’re standing right outside the attic door that her knees lock up all of a sudden, stilling in place. Even as he walks the last few steps to catch up with her, she makes no move to open the door for either of them. Dipper raises an eyebrow at her, raising an arm to tap the back of her’s.

“Uh...Mabel?”

She exhales out of sight, her gaze falling to the floor in front of her. Dipper’s ready to prod her further before she blurts out of nowhere.

“Okay. I’m coming clean: I dumped all my stuff on your bed while I was packing,” she admits, turning back around to face him. “I honestly thought you were gonna stay downstairs.”

“...So?”

“So it looks like my Dream Boy High tape gained sentience and threw up all over it,” she adds, descriptively blunt. Mabel hugs the blanket bundle a little tighter to her chest, smiling sheepishly. “Sorry broseph. Give me a minute to clear it all off?”

It’s hardly anything to be sorry for. But with all that’s happened, he knows how easy it is to feel the blame of anything.

If only to make an effort to dispel her guilt, he’ll dramatically roll his eyes and make a motion to head back downstairs.

“Say no more, sis. Back to the couch it is.”

“Just a minute!” she says, grabbing at his sleeve. “A _minute_. I swear. C’mon.”

As some half-hearted attempt to signify he’s only kidding, he eyes the watch that isn’t on his wrist anymore, and she snorts.

“Fine. A minute.”

“And no peeking, I mean it,” she pleads, stepping backward. “It’s a mess. And it’s embarrassing.”

Mabel only opens their door enough for her and her blanket bundle to squeeze through, discreetly shutting it behind her. Vague, busied noises start up on the other side, the tackling of what he can only imagine is a fraction of her sweater collection.

All while she tidies up inside, Dipper turns back around to stare out into the hallway, breathing deeply.

They’ve entered that liminal hour where the moonlight has all but flooded through every window of the house. He doesn’t need to see it to know it’s already encapsulated his bed. On any other night, he might wander back down to the couch — or the bay window in the hallway, if he were that exhausted.

On any other night, it would keep him up, milky rays he’d moan to and curse internally at for keeping him from his routine four hours of sleep.

Tonight, he’s embracing them.

The scarlet triangular window still raises the hairs on his neck everytime he walks through its beams, but it’s decidedly at night that it feels a little less sinister. It’s a violent red under any hour of the sun, but it’s only now, casting a bleached rosy shade across the floor that for once, it doesn’t feel threatening. It’s almost soothing.

Above all, the eye at the center of it doesn’t blink. It’s the very moment that something washes over him.

Every chance he’s gotten, he’s questioned it all. Beyond just these past few days, it’s been so easy to point a skeptic finger and let the fear take over. It’s been so commonplace that he’s truly forgotten how hard it is to put his trust in just anything, and it’s a depressing thought.

He’s always alone when these epiphanies come to him, and tonight doesn’t seem to be any different.

This has gone on for too long…and it’s such an easily conclusion to just accept. The evidence has more than just mounted against him, letting exhaustion exacerbate his paranoia to the point of lashing out at anything.

The senseless impulses of his own body, the one so hellbent on breaking the very object he’d been sworn to protect, like a product of his own obsession with shattering this reality. Drummed up by his own fragile psyche, dragging him farther and farther away from the truth. The peace of mind he’s looking been for.

Maybe it doesn’t start with Stan or Ford.

Maybe it starts with him.

It isn’t the world acting against him. It’s _him_ acting against him.

And until Mabel opens the door back up to retrieve him, he’ll keep fighting. He’ll force himself to silence his own convictions, once and for all, that the world’s gone to hell and everything is fake. He can’t live like this anymore.

It puts a knot in his throat, what he has to come to terms with most of all. If he were any more tired, it might well up tears in his eyes.

Because he isn’t dead. _He isn’t dead._

And like granting the only solace he could possibly bring to himself tonight, Dipper cups his own hand to the side of his neck and feels for it. He’ll close his eyes and feel for it harder — the very first rhythm he had to ground himself. The monitor from the hospital manifests behinds his eyelids. It’s weak. It’s in need of a lot of help, but it beats on and on and on.

There are few reasons he’s had telling him that it’ll all get better.

He’ll let it be the first.


End file.
